Bread bags make really great Plarn and it’s so easy I promise. You’ll be plarning all your bags, thin carrier bags, toilet roll bags and bread bags. This loop method works well for all of these.
It doesn’t suit thicker plastics like the “bags for life” (pah who are they kidding!) though. Try the spiral or continuous plarn method for these instead. There’s plenty tutorials out there so just google “continuous plarn” and up they’ll come.
So back to our bread bag plarn. First shake out bread crumbs and wash them in either washing up or laundry detergent, rinse thoroughly and air dry your bags to avoid any mould forming from food residue.
1. Lay out your bag and smooth it out
2. Fold in half lengthways
3. Fold in half again
4. And again so you have a long thin rectangle.
5. Trim off the open end to neaten up.
6. Trim off the closed end just above where it joins sides to ensure it’s all off put aside to disgard (I put mine in with torn unusable bags for recycling)
7. Fold over in half and holding both ends taught, snip. This is a super neat and easy way to cut it.
8. Repeat folding in half and cutting each piece until you have pieces approx 1″ wide or just bigger. This is a perfect size.
9. Open out your strips. If you have distinctly different colours you may want to seprate them out and make up small plarn balls in each colour. If not just go with multicolour and start joining.
10. Take 2 strips and loop one through the other. Pull to form a knot, and gently tighten. If you pull too hard it will stretch and may snap so easy does it.
11. Continue to join and then roll up into a ball.
It’s practical to make plarn as you need it rather than make big balls of it. There’s a few reasons I suggest this. Firstly you may want to work with set colours or work on a project that has colour changes so you’ll only want to make enough and no more. You can’t just snip the way you do with yarn, you’d have to unjoin and that’s difficult to do without snapping it. To change colour just loop on new plarn and away you go.
If you fancy getting started on a plarn project I’ve put a few fab links together in a post here. I will have some plarn patterns free on the blog one day too, have fun making Plarn and do let me know how you get on.
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Hello, I have have been cutting the strips of plastic open To get one long strip of plastic. Then I use a 1 inch flat iron to fuse the end of one strip to the end of another strip. It is just another way of making plain.
Thanks for sharing your method. I’ll have to experiment with it too!